[Bay Kid]

I have a family home on Cane Garden that I'm thinking about renting Jan/March. Should I use a good rental agent? Very important to have the best renter.

[vintageogauge]

Getting a "best" renter is a crap shoot at best no matter how you screen a tenant. Most are okay but there are plenty of pigs out there.

[CoachKandSportsguy]

Originally Posted by Bay Kid

I have a family home on Cane Garden that I'm thinking about renting Jan/March. Should I use a good rental agent? Very important to have the best renter.

make sure there is nothing of value in the house,
make sure you are covered with renter's insurance / on premise liability
make sure that the rent is high enough to discourage people looking for cheap to destroy
make sure that you understand that it could be trashed.

Make sure that you get ALL the rent up front, ALL the rent. . and make sure there is time to validate the form of payment as legitimate, check to clear, and not a credit card. . .
make sure you have a stiff penalty clause in the rental contract.

Make sure you validate that the person is the real person renting. .

Then you might have a better chance at a quality renter. . .

[Two Bills]

My wife and I overwintered in TV for many years.
By far, the worst maintained properties were the ones looked after by agents.
If you have the time, rent it yourself.
The vetting is minimal through agents, and mainly consists or whether you can pay.
They take their cut irrespective of damage, but you pick up the tab.
JMO.

[dougjb]

Whatever you do, DO NOT use DownHome. I had a horrible experience with them that cost me a great deal of money. They would never respond to left voice messages (with personnel in their office) or emails or texts. I still do not know how they continue in business. They are the proverbial wolves in sheep clothing. Very nice on the outside. But, close to total incompetence on the inside.

If you want details, just PM me.

[thelegges]

We use a management company for eight months. Fired them because of theft damage and our contract was for rent three months only. Our neighbors called to give us heads up renting 1-3 days. We made unannounced trip noting $1,400 of items missing.

Owner was unhappy we actually had pics of everything. Their cleaning people were stealing and selling at markets of Marion. Company fixed everything, refunded the loss, then we fired them.

Rented on our own for 14 years with great long term tenants that we chose with zero issues.

[MrChip72]

We use rentfromavillager dot com and handle everything ourselves. 90% of the agents that do this have poor reputations and take a big cut of the rent. It's not hard to find renters that have references from renting here in previous years.